The city of Siracusa has created a new ‘House of Associations and Volunteers’ transferring the practice of of the city of Riga leading the ACTive NGOss Transfer Networks, and a comprehensive governance model that sees as protagonists the local NGOs and the municipality, by boosting the uses and linking three civic spaces located in strategic locations in the city.

Through the experience of ACTive NGOs, Siracus succeeded to organise the co-management of new social aggregators regulated by a Protocol of Understanding among the Municipality and 27 associations active in the city.

Siracusa is a medium-sized city on the east coast of Sicily. With its rich ancient past, the city is listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site. Its main economy is tourism but its population suffers from under investments on utilities and infrastructure due to public budget cuts on social services, and endemic unemployment especially hitting the youngest population and migrants. In order to address some of these issues, the municipality wanted to cooperate more closely with various social and economic actors, and involve NGOs in promoting social inclusion and citizen participation. However, NGOs had limited opportunities and needed better physical spaces to carry out recreational, cultural and social activities, training courses, and citizens’ services.

In this frame, Siracusa wanted to experiment locally the Riga practice of the NGO house. Riga’s relied on substantial public funds for its large structure and dedicated staff, but this was not the case for Siracusa, which then decided to adapt the Riga example starting from the local resources. These were the three, already existing but dormant, civic spaces needing better management.

The solution is therefore a formalisation, through a “Protocol of understanding”, of the common use by NGOs of these under-utilised civic spaces:

1. The Citizens’ House, a social center in the periphery of Siracusa, called La Mazzarona. The Citizens’ House was first established in 2015, after the city of Syracuse decided to join the GeniUS! URBACT II Transfer Network. La Mazzarona district presented many challenges, including high levels of unemployment, social exclusion and poverty. At that time except from a school, no services were available for the neighborhood’s residents. Public participation was for the first time activated in La Mazzarona thanks to the GeniUS! project, but the project encountered a halt which have been revitalised through the project House of Associations and Volunteers resulting from the  ACTive NGOs URBACT III network.
2. The Officina Giovani, (Youth Lab) located in the historic center of Ortigia, a space inaugurated in 2015 dedicated to aggregation and participation of the city’s youth.
3. The Urban Center, located in the nineteenth-century city center, a space newly restored dedicated to citizens and local associations. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic the Urban Center has been temporarily converted into a Covid-19 vaccine location.

The three civic spaces are meant for organizing seminars and workshops, laboratories, events and thematic talks to address societal issues.

The case of Siracusa shows three main aspects of sustainable integration as intended in URBACT.

The first aspect is the vertical integration (the cooperation between all levels of government and local players’ among municipal sectors), a salient feature of this Siracusa case. The cooperation among the municipal administration and local associations, sharing ideas and objectives for the House od Associations and Volunteers is an important milestone considering that this form of cooperation was not experimented before. Through ACTive NGOs the local associations started to get to know each other, imagining new possible synergies while changing their position towards the local administration: from bodies mostly depending and benefitting from the public budget towards active subjects proposing, sharing visions and collaborating for better service provision. This reduced dependency from the public administration, the sharing of responsibilities by NGOs in the project is also a promise towards the self-sustainability of this practice.

The second is the territorial integration: the three NGO houses centers’ locations represent the decision of creating a spatial ecosystem that could cover the whole city. 

The third is the combination of soft and hard measures by investing in refurbishing and ameliorating existing structures, combined with the investment on socio-cultural and inclusive activities. 

From the earliest stages of the project, participation has been essential. Looking at the experience of Lead Partner Riga, in 2019 an ad-hoc multi stakeholder URBACT Local Group (ULG) was created made up of municipality representatives and 27 associations active in the city. The ULG intensively worked with more than 15 meetings. This process of exchange led to a co-designed and co-written Protocol of Understanding to manage what is now in Sicuracusa called new Houses of Associations and Volunteers (Casa delle associazioni e dei volontari), signed by ULG members. The Protocol “defines the places, responsibilities and governance of a system made of the three Houses of Associations and Volunteers,” explained Caterina Timpanaro, an expert who supported Siracusa in the process. After signing the protocol, the associations elected their governing bodies and began to operate autonomously.

With this the municipality is learning the new role of supervisor, dedicating exclusive structures to associations, while listening to the needs to various stakeholders incorporating them into public programs and activities.

The ACTive NGOs Network has given the opportunity to experiment a mode of cooperation of public and private sector creating new and effective synergy between the municipality and NGOs. The creation of a Protocol of Understanding is the tangible results establishing this collaboration to which local actors will refer to beyond the lifetime of the URBACT ACTive NGOs network:

The immediate next step for the municipality and local associations is to plan an innovative grand opening with residents, pending appropriate Covid-19-related arrangements.

In the longer term, Siracusa’s challenge will be to establish more structured cooperation between institutions and NGOs to change the nature of local services, based on a systematic involvement of citizens and associations.

Transferring Riga’s good practice meant to adapt the city’s trajectory to Siracusa’s particular history, driving forces and inertia in public-civic cooperation: in contrast with Riga’s fully municipality-financed and managed NGO House, in Siracusa the municipality provided the three civic spaces and then decided to step back and collaborate with local associations to co-develop and manage their spaces. The associations in fact elected their own governing bodies and began to operate autonomously from the municipality.

As an ACTive NGOs partner city, benefited from sharing methodologies, tools and knowledge from the other network cities. As examples Siracusa learnt the value of stakeholder “mapping” as an effective tool in the short and long term, helping improve and expand the knowledge from Santa Pola (ES) and has been inspired with new ideas for recreational activities (morning coffee, football matches, etc.) fundamental both for the ULG's commitment and for the activities with the residents  from Brighton (UK). Dubrovnik (HR) proved that public administrations can use physical resources to create strategic locations and channel various funds, which Siracusa found “very inspirational”.    

Hamburg consists of seven districts and the district of Hamburg-Altona is the westernmost urban borough of Hamburg with a population of 270, 263 (Dec. 2016) with an area of 77.4 km2. The District of Altona is therefore part of the greater City of Hamburg, a major trading crossroads on the North- as well as Baltic Sea with both a long history of immigration and a growing, diverse population. Around 14% of the city’s residents are from first or second generation immigrant backgrounds, a statistic of foreign population growing in the district of Altona.

Between 2015-16, 60,000 refugees arrived in the city requiring the provision of extra accommodation and services and Hamburg employed some innovative processes to do this such the “Work and Integration Centre for Refugees – WIR-Centre” the Finding Places scheme- URBACT recognised Good Practice. A large proportion of refugees have been accommodated in Hamburg-Altona.

However, in recent years, the city has witnessed a disturbing rise in xenophobic populism and hate speech in both traditional and social media. Preoccupied for the phenomena, and for the attack of public opinion towards a pro-refugees agenda of the city of Hambourg,  the District of Altona in 2018 analysed  the situation in paper on integration and social inclusion. This paper led to a revision and updating of the local strategy from integration of minority groups (Integrationskonzept), towards comprehensive policies of inclusion and diversity targeting the whole population. While politicians were generally committed to this approach, they soon perceived the limits of issuing a top-down agenda in favour of tolerance and diversity., which would have been perceived by locals as imposed.

The solution evolved by joining the URBACT Transfer Network of Rumorless cities towards co-designing with inhabitants a formal declaration of inclusion and a campaign in public space about the principles exposed in the declaration.     At first, public events and workshops have been organised across the district and via digital communications, inviting residents from different backgrounds to share their opinions on concepts such as social cohesion, community, democracy and equality and what sort of society they want to live in.

In the second phase, the content collected during phase one was collated and edited into seventeen statements. These were promoted at summer festivals across the district and people were encouraged to vote, to which 1 000 people responded. Subsequently, the declaration was launched at a press conference by the city mayor and by Marcell Jansen a famous local sportsperson. This was closely followed by a public democracy conference with the goal of supporting citizens to make the declaration their own and to develop ideas for spreading it’s messages and values. The declaration turned then into a campaign with printed and digital media in public spaces. Unfortunately, Covid-19 was tough for a campaign so strongly reliant on face-to-face activities. The work with schools was stopped, and Altona’s biggest cultural festival — potentially a powerful catalyst for promotion — was cancelled. This forced a creative rethink and a shift towards digital communications, including a campaign kit for civil society organisations.

Thankfully, the Mayor of Altona was personally committed, speaking at the launch event and referring back to the declaration in a public statement condemning discrimination after hate mail was sent to the Altona mosque.

Altona practice focuses on integrating the good practice of Rumourless cities across departments in the district offices and involving local population in co-designing the antidiscrimination campaigns that involves not only minority groups but the whole population. Altona is committed to exploring further ways to communicate and embed the declaration in the life and institutions of this district of Hamburg. For example, politicians have agreed to display a plaque of the declaration prominently on the town hall. A crucial target group is now schools and young people who will be invited to visit and discuss the values and ideas set out in the declaration.

In Altona, a group of stakeholders was already co-developing an anti-discrimination strategy, including a set of principles to be known as the ‘Altona Declaration’. Joining URBACT RUMOURLESS CITIES Network was a chance to add inspiration and momentum to this campaign, and transform the initial idea of a top down anti-discrimination campaigning into a co-designed strategy (see Solution section). The existing stakeholder group in Altona formed an expanded URBACT Local Group (ULG), bringing political leaders and residents.

The collaboration among inhabitants and city offices to co-create the Altona Declaration resulted in  a series of 17 anti- discrimination statements posted online and promoted at events. 1000 people voted, selecting the top seven statements that formed the body of the declaration now part of a larger campaign involving public spaces in the district. The local partners and especially the ULG-members used the new kit, eg the flyers and posters, to disseminate the seven thesis of the Altona Declaration.

The change of attitudes is not easy to measure, especially not with the resources of the project. But one can be hopeful that some, more doubtful persons, started to reflect their personal points of view on diversity.

”In concrete terms, we were able to benefit from the exchange with the international partner cities. We learned how great the influence of positive rather than negative framing can be in conveying messages”. Adelina Michalk Department of Social Services, Municipality of Hamburg-Altona.

Hamburg/Altona found the regular peer review opportunities during transnational meetings of the Transfer network Rumorless cities particularly useful for taking on board practical tips and ideas for anti-rumour strategies. This included a ‘Gallery Walk’, where partner cities used visual images to capture their progress and exchange learning.

One notably valuable technique transferred from the city of Amadora, lead partner of the Transfer network, was the active involvement of ‘ambassadors’ to convey key messages to sections within the community. These elected officials, civil servants, and influential citizens assumed a pivotal role as the local campaign was rolled out.

Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, despite a low poverty rate overall, has identified 16 areas at risk of social exclusion. Mostly located close to the city center and populated by 12-15 000 citizens, these areas are home to mainly Roma people – the major ethnical minority in Brno. Experts estimate that 78% of Roma children leave school early, compared with a regional average of 2.7%.  To deal with this situation, Brno municipality welcomed the proposal of the URBACT network ONSTAGE transferring the good practice of L’Hospitalet, namely of  the Municipal Music School and Arts Centre (EMMCA)  , an education scheme that improves social inclusion through arts and music. Even before ONSTAGE, the municipality co-financed a music programme provided by local organisations and ran high-quality affordable music schools (ZUŠ) for children throughout the city, but  children from socially challenged backgrounds were usually unattending.

Through ONSTAGE a wide variety of stakeholders, including representatives from the municipality and the region, all local non-profit organizations and schools situated in the target areas have been brought together to introduce the educational music program similar to EMMCA’s one in 10 target schools.

Brno’s pilot program began in September 2019 in the primary school ZŠ nám. 28. Října, extending the morning curricular programme with an extra music lesson for 5th to 9th grade classes. In parallel, another music program was started in a newly opened kindergarten, MŠ Sýpka, which entailed the setting up of a weekly group music course and the purchase of musical instruments.

At the end of November 2019, a free-of-tuition community choir ONSTAGE was established. In January 2020, another music program in the primary school ZŠ Merhautova (3x2h/week) was opened.

In the spring of 2020, all the programs were well established, but encountered a halt during lockdown. However, despite the slowing of activities due to Covid-19, group violin, cello and guitar lessons began in two primary schools — and in September 2020, 37 students signed up for guitar lessons, four times more than the year before. As a result, the project had a real impact on the understanding and use of music for social change.

One of the key points of the approach has been the establishment of the Urban Local Group (ULG), composed by a wide variety of stakeholders, including both institutional representatives (from the municipality and the region), local associations, and schools. This alliance has been fundamental in supporting the project throughout its duration and assuring the project’s sustainability after its official conclusion. The diversity of the ULG’s members also meant valuable insights into the specific problems of social exclusion and policies to counteract them from different perspectives.

Participation has been one of the main objectives of the project since its early stages and there are now a lot of agents positively engaged.

By targeting schools with a high number of pupils from socially excluded segments of society, participation in the music programs has been fundamental in bringing together children from different backgrounds.

The choir represented an important tool for participation as well. It was the result of a cooperation with local non-profit organization IQ Roma Servis and it was free of tuition. At the basis of the project there was the belief that a broad repertoire – popular songs, gospels and traditional Roma songs – and no age restriction represented promising concepts for creating a community space where local people could meet and share the joy of making music together and get to know the richness of the Roma’s musical culture.

The ON STAGE Transfer Network has made it possible in Brno to think of an innovative and more inclusive music education system through enhancing social cohesion.

Although state basic schools (ZUŠ) offer high quality music education, it is mainly designed to prepare students for the conservatory, which opens for them the opportunity to pursue a professional career in music. Teaching music to enhance social cohesion was a concept little known in the city and its potential had hardly been explored. Being part of the ON STAGE project gave Brno the chance to change this. Social cohesion has been enhanced and many children who did not attend musical classes before have then joined the new programs. For the second year of the programme (2020/2021) even more people signed to the courses and the choir.

Despite Covid-19 related restrictions, all the programs have been successful in establishing foundations with students and teachers who believe in the idea of the project and are willing to continue. In only a short period of time, the ON STAGE project has been meaningful for Brno and can actually make positive changes.

The ON STAGE Trasfernetwork was led by the city of L’Hospitalet and involved, apart from Brno, Aarhus (Denmark), Katowice (Poland), Adelfia (Italy), Valongo (Portugal) and Grigny (France).

The ON STAGE Transfer Network organized also a teachers’ mobility program. For Brno’s teachers, seeing L’Hospitalet’s group-based ‘El Sistema’ teaching method in practice was a real eye-opener — as were opportunities to exchange with partner cities such as Grigny (a suburb of Paris, France).

Cork is Ireland’s second largest city, and a busy port, a hub of industry, located in the south-western corner of the country. URBACT Playful Paradigm Network, ‘play’ for Cork City Council was predominantly about the construction and management of playgrounds. A holistic understanding of play did not exist beyond a handful of practitioners. Learning from Udine meant adapting the god practice and inventing new project that could respond to local constraints such as the challenge to organize public events due to legal requirements for public liability insurance, or lack of resources as for the ludobus project.

The creativity of the URBACT Local Group led to the creation of a new figure, the part-time Play Development Officer and 26 certified volunteer ‘Play Leaders’, which developed a wide range of projects such as:

• Toy Libraries: in Cork there are ten municipal libraries throughout the city. Thanks to the Network, members of the City Library and a member of Young Knocknaheeny, a group that specializes in early childhood development, had the opportunity to do a study visit to Paris and see how a Toy Library works. They came up with the idea to store “Community Play Bags” in the ten municipal libraries. The “Community Play Bags” are oversized sports gear bags containing equipment for cooperative play, which is appropriate for different ages. By placing them in the library system, the project has been developed to allow for borrowing by community-based organizations seeking to incorporate play in their activities.
• Playful Placemaking The Marina is a road of approximately 2.5 km along the River Lee in the city. This road was mainly used for car traffic, yet it had potential as an amenity for outdoor recreational activity and for the general enjoyment of the river. The Cork project team decided to test two project actions namely to organize a playful festival and some pop-up play events by applying to stop car traffic on the Marina road for car traffic on four Sundays in the summer of 2019. The communication was not on ‘closing the road’ per se, but rather on opening the road for play. This was done as part of the city’s annual Lifelong Learning Festival.
• Ludo buses inspired by the lead partner Udine’s good practice, Cork has developed its own Ludo Buses. Ludo buses are vehicles that contain outdoor games that can be driven to any public space/gathering and made available to the community as a play resource for a number of hours.
• Play Packs With the disruption of Covid-19, the Cork City Council’s Social Inclusion Unit teamed up with the community and voluntary sector to create Play Packs. They contained booklets, video-tutorials and materials to create games at home, such as lollipop sticks, colouring pencils and crayons) and were distributed to hundreds of families in need during the first period of the Covid emergency. The Play Packs created a buzz in the local community and were seen as a useful tool also for other disadvantaged categories. Cork recently decided to start a new wave of distribution to people with intellectual disabilities and to people living in nursing home and long-stay hospitals.

The project of Cork has predominantly invested into soft measures for social inclusion, promoting the integration and collaboration of different actors both across different departments of the municipality with diverse and multi sector group, called “Let’s Play Cork”, coordinated through Cork Healthy City (Cork is in fact in the World Health Organization “Healthy Cities” network since 2012) and Cork City Council along with members of Cork City Libraries, Young Knocknaheeny (a group that specializes in early childhood development), Foróige (a charity which addresses youth development), Cork Lifelong Learning Festival and Meitheal Mara (a community boatyard in Cork). The scope has been to foster a play-oriented approach to education and public space management in the city.

In terms of sustainability  the city has continually sought seed funding from alternative sources to make Let’s Play Cork continue after the end of the Transfer Network. The city is also looking at specific investments based on the lessons of the project. Notably, the City Council has earmarked the riverside road for a EUR 4 million project to permanently pedestrianise it. Additionally, Cork is now set to transfer the Playful Paradigm Good Practice to more Irish cities, supported by the URBACT National Practice Transfer Initiative 2021-2022.

The URBACT Local Group (ULG) brought Cork City Council together with public bodies and associations across health, education, culture and sports. The sense of shared ownership and entrepreneurial approach sparked unexpected opportunities and partnerships.

The ULG has evolved into a steering group called ‘Let’s Play Cork’ that has already started advocating for the concept of the ‘playful city’ to become a core objective of the City Development Plan and is also contributing to a ‘Manifesto of EU Playful Cities’.

The Playful Paradigm  Network has led to changes in  attitude towards gaming and playing both in local, regional and national policy design and visioning, visible in new and fruitful partnerships between organizations.

Along the way Cork also learned to interject play into its interagency networks, allowing it to disseminate the core values and objectives of play. Partnering organizations subsequently incorporated play into their ways of working as well as to their services and events, engaging in new ways with the communities that they serve and reach. This has unlocked new forms of creativity to help tackle some of the societal challenges that every city faces.

Exchanges between Cork and the city of Udine were already in place before the Urbact Transfer network , namely through the  World Health Organisation’s Healthy Cities network.  But the URBACT  Playful paradigm network unlocked the capacities to pragmatically experiment the approach of playing the city in a number of projects, whose ideas and creativity is tied to peer learning among the European cities.

Transnational meetings between network partners enabled participants from Cork to bring home specific ideas and skills. For example, representatives of the city library and an early childhood programme were able to visit a toy library in Paris, leading to adoption of a similar model in Cork. Another workshop, in Viana di Castelo (PT), gave the Cork local group the con dence and theoretical basis to create the new River Lee Placemaking network described above.

Aveiro had already been on the way towards more digitalisation for quite some time when it received the opportunity to benefit from the experience of Gijon and to transfer its practice of a citizen card: a card simplifying local services, while unifying them under a unique physical support. After having introduced a common card for all students, the municipality also developed new online services and is envisaging to develop even more.

Aveiro is an industrial city with an important seaport on the western coast of Portugal and also known as ‘the Portuguese Venice’. More recently, it has become known as a digital cluster, a territory of innovation with a strong knowledge economy, dynamic university, centre for telecoms R&D, and innovative firms in the digital and traditional sectors. However, the increasing development of new digital solutions had created a complex system of providers, interfaces and information sources for various services around the city, which was increasingly hard for local people to navigate.

The Municipality has been wanting to simplify citizens’ access to public services and transform Aveiro into a smarter, more open, resilient and inclusive society. In 2018, it launched an Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) project ‘Aveiro STEAM CITY’, supporting the adoption of 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

Aveiro has started by introducing a common card for all students across its different schools. All services provided by the municipality and schools can be managed and paid with it. This includes the cafeteria, school supplies, photocopying, even access to the buildings and school-day extensions. Crucial preparatory actions included mapping different systems to ensure compatibility and ease of use.

Almost simultaneously, the Municipality also activated new online services, with a wide range of options. Different linkages, payments loading, single sign-in and a number of other key elements discussed in Card4All are already in place.

The integrated approach supported by the ULG has been particularly valuable in helping the work with CARD4ALL fit into Aveiro’s constellation of ongoing projects, creating synergies and building on existing policies.

In addition, the services provided via the card clearly relate to environmentally friendly solutions such as a public transport. It can also potential include social benefits directly into the card.

To reach this point, Aveiro and its stakeholders exchanged regularly with fellow partner CARD4ALL cities, and learned directly about Lead Partner Gijon’s Citizen Card system, including technical tools required for its development. This has already informed key elements of Aveiro’s new online public services and the emerging citizen card plans.

Local developments have been coordinated with an URBACT Local Group (ULG) comprising two different groups of stakeholders. The first engages all existing service providers on a practical, technical level. The second is a municipal cross-departmental group linking with wider economic development activities.

The network and the wider activities enjoy strong support from local politicians – and a clearly identified demand from citizens.

Based on the practice of Gijon, the municipal departments are still working together to create a broader citizen card system covering almost all sectors of local life, including: mobility (bikes, buses, ferry, parking…); education and sports; culture (libraries, museums, theatre…); tourism; IT; and ‘the front office’ that deals directly with citizens. Each department acts as an intermediary with their own external service providers and concession holders, encouraging strong cross-sectoral cooperation. The card’s success in the future will require technical capacity, financial and human resources – including a municipal team of ICT developers and technical experts – which is not always easy to maintain in Portuguese municipalities.

The transfer journey has been demanding but rich. As a direct outcome, despite all ongoing challenges, the city is now working with more public service providers to add the library, museums, bus and bike sharing system to a new citizen card, further simplifying life for residents.

Implementing community gardens can be highly beneficial for a city not only for environmental purpose but also for social ones: to fight social exclusion, and bring neighbours together, at the same time as organisation education activities for children around them. This is what Vilnius has done while transferring the Good Practice of Rome, in ‘sleeping districts’, with training for gardeners and set-up of adequate urban management schemes.

Lithuania’s capital is particularly green, with 44% of its territory dedicated to forests, parks and squares. However, while family garden allotments persist from Soviet times, understanding of shared community gardens is still limited.

The municipality owns various public spaces, including grounds of schools and kindergartens, but most vacant space in Vilnius is privately or state-owned. This has challenged the municipality’s capacity to promote urban agriculture.

The shared urban garden initiatives that have existed so far have done so without city support. Meanwhile, most community groups lack the funding and permanent staff necessary to commit to gardening projects.

RU:RBAN gave Vilnius the knowledge to promote urban gardening as a way to fight social exclusion, and bring neighbours - even in high-rise ‘sleeping districts’ - together.

The ULG focused on a key component of Rome’s practice – a clear set of regulations for communities to know how and where to start an urban garden. It was not a process of copy-paste, but of understanding and adapting.

Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of the group, the City Council approved a new set of rules and regulations for urban gardening in March 2021. In addition, the municipality released a guide to urban gardening which gained national media attention as part of a broader environmental awareness drive.

The practice developed by Vilnius following the experience of Rome is based strongly on environmental protection and awareness by developing urban gardens. Its social aspect is key as these gardens are actually “community” gardens, with all well-known and documented benefits for neighourhoods as groups and as individuals, such as mental health, socialisation, skills development etc. In particular trainings and sharing of seeds can have wider impacts on the local economy.

A new URBACT Local Group (ULG) was set up including gardening enthusiasts, NGOs, schools, the municipality, and the Environment Ministry.

The members of Vilnius’ ULG benefited collectively and within their own specific fields from the experience and ideas of Rome and the other partner cities. This included gardeners sharing seeds and participating in “Gardenizer” trainings. It also involved “totally fascinated” city planners learning how Rome developed urban farming at a huge scale, right down to the smallest details of their financing model.

ULG members also gained valuable knowledge about new communication tools, including through trainings in Riga where they learnt to use tools such as ‘vox pops’ and understand the value of their story for others.

The Municipality has also started a new strategic long-term program - CITY+ - aimed at recreating a sense of community in the former soviet districts. One of the important aspects is to create a feeling of ownership by allowing citizens to have their own yard and therefore an opportunity to create their small urban gardens.

With around 60% of the city’s population living in these buildings, Vilnius’ new urban garden trend looks set to continue.

Vilnius implemented the practice from Rome by starting with one existing community garden and built from there. Gradually, the number of urban gardens in Vilnius started to grow. Furthermore, the model is now formally included in the city’s urban development policies.

Another interesting aspect was that they linked the development of community gardens with ecological education and vegetable growing in kindergartens - an activity appreciated by partner cities during their study visit.

Solving land ownership issues will remain a key challenge for the spread of urban gardening, requiring ongoing dialogue with private and state owners. To free up more land, Vilnius will also start discussions with the National Land Authority to allow communities temporary use of state-owned land for their urban garden initiatives.

As for its own land, the city will now be proposing the option of including an urban garden whenever it discusses green area renovation plans with communities. The municipality also expects to continue making further improvements to relevant legal procedures to facilitate urban gardens.

Based on Barnsley’s good practice, Piraeus launched its own ‘Blue Lab’– the first Blue Economy Innovation Center in Greece. Blue Lab is one of the few centres in Greece that has a dedicated ‘makerspace’ for start-ups to focus on creating functional prototypes to develop their main ideas.

The Municipality of Piraeus, part of the Athens urban area, urgently needed to support recovery after the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite being a major freight and passenger port, the number of businesses and jobs were falling in all sectors, with several large shipping companies relocating elsewhere.

Piraeus developed an integrated ‘Blue Growth Strategy’ (2018-2024) aiming to develop innovation and higher value jobs in sustainable businesses related to the sea, coasts and maritime heritage. Goals included attracting international technology businesses, encouraging existing businesses to adopt modern technologies, and helping young people improve their digital skills.

The municipality joined the Tech Revolution network in particular to enhance the digital aspects of their Blue Growth Strategy.

Based on Barnsley’s good practice, Piraeus launched its own ‘Blue Lab’– the first Blue Economy Innovation Center in Greece. The municipality worked with a private contractor to found Blue Lab in a modern facility near the harbour, that welcomes young people and early-stage businesses who want to develop technological and business skills through a range of services (seminars, co-working space, advanced technology).  Blue Lab is one of the few centres in Greece that has a dedicated ‘makerspace’ for start-ups to focus on creating functional prototypes to develop their main ideas. A variety of industrial equipment supports the activities.

Before the end of its first year, Piraeus’ Blue Lab had welcomed hundreds of visitors, and provided 1080 hours of business mentoring, 608 hours of tech and entrepreneurship training, multiple workshops and networking events, sparking more than 28 prototyping projects and 27 entrepreneurship ideas.

University students and professors also linked up with Blue Lab. When COVID-19 struck, they used the facilities to produce prototype technology solutions that could benefit the community – including a ‘Blue Air’ concept to sterilise air using ultraviolet radiation, and Personal Protective Equipment such as surgical masks.

Blue Lab and Piraeus’s activities seek to improve the social and economic wellbeing of citizens through the creation of more and better jobs and businesses. The infrastructure also supports the development of skills and opportunities increasingly needed for the development of innovative solutions for addressing the current issues at stake in the blue economy. Blue economy is a strategic priority of Piraeus and it offers an integrative framework for sustainable urban development as it constitutes a socio-economic opportunity due to the city’s unique maritime position.

A crucial step in transferring the good practice was engaging the local community, educational institutions and business representatives and private-sector partners as part of an URBACT Local Group (ULG). Cooperating with local stakeholders, the team decided to provide state-of-the art technologies - such as 3D designing/printing and microelectronic systems – to promote innovation and to develop digital adoption programmes for local businesses.

Crucially, the ULG approach achieved wholehearted engagement – including with enthusiastic senior city decision-makers. This sparked strong new partnerships. Schools in particular have been keen to engage with Blue Lab, for example through field visits.

Tech Revolution has boosted Piraeus’ strategic vision for the local Blue Economy and, starting this June, the municipality is going to offer business start-up, scale-up and innovation support as core services, as in Barnsley.  

Cooperation with businesses has also led to plans for a second, bigger innovation centre as a springboard for entrepreneurial activity. Piraeus’ plans include a larger co-working space, training facilities to upskill the workforce and investment in more advanced technologies.

The hope is that this energy will feed into a broader receptiveness to digital adoption and subsequent development of higher-value jobs in the local economy.

Piraeus’ learning journey was supported by exchanges with Tech Revolution city partners – including at a transnational meeting for all network partners in Piraeus - and reinforced by visits from Barnsley and the URBACT Lead Expert. These exchanges helped identify the most important lessons and inspiration for their own city, in particular around the centre’s economic viability, promising digital technologies, new ways to engage local stakeholders, and how to promote collaboration and start-up formation.

Koszalin is a city in northwest Poland located 12 km south of the Baltic Sea coast. The three most important sectors of the economy are industry, construction and tourism.

Koszalin had already worked with Preston (UK) as a partner in the 2015-2018 URBACT network ‘Procure’, in which it had sought to understand if and how procurement could really be used to create jobs, support SMEs, and address environmental challenges - and whether procurement bureaucracy could really be reduced.

As a result, the city already had a local Integrated Action Plan (IAP) to improve its approaches to procurement and was convinced of the power of procurement to prompt both local economic change and pursue sustainability objectives.

In 2018, Koszalin was looking for help to implement their ambitious new IAP, and particularly objectives  around understanding more effectively their procurement spending, encouraging local SMEs to bid for procurement opportunities with Koszalin City Council,  including social and environmental considerations in decision-making; and influencing the procurement behaviour of other anchor institutions”.

The approach developed by Preston for procurement addressed local (economic), social and environmental considerations, while seeking to promote local products, social enterprises, local SMEs and environmentally friendly products. At the same time integration is key within municipalities and in the cites to ensure that these criteria are correctly identified and addressed.

Through their URBACT Local Group (ULG), Koszalin City Council transferred the spend analysis tool to anchor institutions within the city, such as the Regional Hospital, Technical University of Koszalin, and Koszalin District Administration. This enabled them to explore alongside the city authorities how much they spend, and where that money goes geographically, sectorally and in business type terms.

Across all procurers within the city, they collectively identified an annual spend of over EUR 100 million making procurement a significant contributor to Gross Domestic Product. The City Council was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which procurement spend was already spent with organisations in the Koszalin Functional Urban Area (83%) and SMEs (91%).

Addressing the other side of the procurement dynamic, Koszalin strengthened relations with business representative bodies and SMEs. They surveyed business chambers to identify challenges and how they could be addressed to support SME participation in procurement.

The city adopted Preston’s spend analysis tool and achieved the core objective of their previous URBACT network and IAP: to understand the scale of procurement spend in the city and to use this evidence to shape wider procurement practice.

Koszalin has presented their procurement activities and results at events organised by the Polish National URBACT Point to showcase their example as a city that has realised real incremental change. They also shared their learning bilaterally with the Gdansk-Gdynia-Sopot Metropolitan Area and they feature as a case study in URBACT’s strategic procurement training programme.

The involvement in Procure and Making Spend Matter has been “incredibly beneficial” for procurement in Koszalin and the city representatives are convinced that this is only the beginning of a new journey around procurement. Indeed, they recognise that progressive procurement is integral to the future economic, social and environmental destiny of Koszalin.

Mataró has sought to develop further the development of its blue economy sector by transferring the practice Piraeus of a Blue Growth Initiative. While identifying and bringing together all the relevant local stakeholders, securing funding and adequate awards, it developed the local use Workshops, Demo Days, mentoring, incubating and business acceleration for start-uppers and new entrepreneurs.

Mataró has the largest port between Barcelona and France. Despite its four beaches, port, boat repair yard, and university maritime courses for students from around the world, the city has historically ‘lived with its back to the sea’. Mataró had an annual entrepreneurship awards programme - ‘Cre@tic’ - but nothing specific on the blue economy.

The Municipality wanted to promote a more nautical culture, and related business opportunities. They had a broad plan to harness the potential of the city’s key assets, to give the port a more positive role in the city’s future economic development and to cooperate on a maritime strategy with neighbouring municipalities. The foundations for this project were laid in the ‘Sea in Value’ project, which sought to promote a nautical culture, develop the blue economy and open the city to the sea.

In this context, Mataró saw BluAct as a good opportunity to learn from other European cities and contribute to their activities stimulating entrepreneurship and new jobs in the blue economy.

After having identified its ULG members (see below), Mataró reinforced connections with the private sector thanks to activities such as university-based ‘entrepreneur hours’, mentoring schemes, and funds for small pilot projects.

The Municipality created a new Blue Growth Entrepreneurship competition, building on the 20 years of knowledge and experience of the existing annual entrepreneurship awards programme. The project was coordinated and promoted locally by the municipality’s  City Promotion team, with the constant support of the technical experts in entrepreneurship of TecnoCampus.

Mataro focused its activities on the development of new economic businesses (products and services) in the blue economy, with a specific stress on being circular and with a reduced environmental footprint. Moreover, the activities sought to develop job and business development, with a strong social added value.

Mataró started its whole project by identifying diverse stakeholders working with blue growth, innovation and entrepreneurship, bringing them together for the first time in an URBACT Local Group. The group was formed with members of the Quadruple Helix, drawn from public administration, education, export associations, environmental organisations, citizens and business, they include: the dynamic regional ‘Barcelona Nautic Cluster’; Mataró Port Authority; Barcelona Provincial Government; and the technology park TecnoCampus, which includes the University and a business incubator. The work of the URBACT Local Group was crucial in building local awareness and professional relationships in support of the blue economy.

The municipality was able to secure EUR 4 000 from the Mataró Port Consortium and EUR 2 000 from the Barcelona Provincial Government to provide cash prizes and cover marketing and promotion costs. In addition, TecnoCampus offered its high quality mentoring and business accelerator programme free of charge (valued at €1,000 for each of three winner projects).

In March 2020, during the Demo Day, three winning ideas were selected from seven high-quality applications. An award ceremony took place in June, with mentoring and incubation provided from July 2020 to February 2021. Top prize went to the first Spanish nautical workshop franchise for the refit and repair of boats. Second, an online application facilitating communication between superyachts, management companies, refit shipyards and contractors. And in third place, an environmentally friendly and quiet electric boat propulsion system.

Mataró was directly inspired by Piraeus’ good practice, but also flexible in its implementation. Having drawn up a Transfer Plan to adopt Piraeus’ practice - and guided by the network’s Lead Expert - Mataró worked with commercial sponsors and adjusted plans to take account of various local negotiations and administrative procedures.

The result was a similar blue entrepreneurship competition, but with a local twist. For example, Mataró took its own competition a step further than the original by offering applicants small amounts of prize funding (€4,000 donated by Mataró’s Port) to help kickstart their business ideas.

With its partners, the city has developed a strong foundation programme which it plans to build on, maintaining the Blue Growth Competition as an annual or biennial event.

Mataró is also now considering the feasibility of supporting a broader range of aspiring entrepreneurs, with more events such as hackathons and workshops focused on generating new ideas and projects in the seed phase.

In Vilafranca, a city of 40 thousand residents, there are 951 (6,5 % of the stock) vacant apartments and five vacant residential buildings are listed. Ownership: 1% public authority, 74% Individual owners, and 25% commercial housing enterprises.

In the context of high poverty, exclusion and the increasing number of empty housing units, accentuated by the crisis, the city developed the “From empty housing to social inclusion” programme. The aim for this inclusion programme is the renovation and rehabilitation of vacant housing while reusing them for social purposes. In this programme the council does the construction work with public investment, and in return for the public investment, the owner transfers the use of the building to the council for a period of time proportional to the investment. When the constructions work finishes the Social Services select beneficiary families. This programme required 300.000 € per year in the city budget. So far, more than 250 houses have been renovated (appr. 10 flats per year) and offered on preferential lease to poor or homeless families, and 500 persons have gained professional skills through the training programmes. More renovation could be done if there would be more public money.

This GP of Vilafranca: https://urbact.eu/empty-housing-social-inclusion

Vilafranca was very satisfied with its project which was considered a Good Practice by the Diputació de Barcelona first and then by URBACT in 2017 because it not only affected the recovery of empty housing but also improved the social level of the unemployed workers who participated in the rehabilitation, considering to close the circle. This practice, despite the good results obtained, proved to be insufficient when large homeowners got out of their properties in anticipation of future price increases. This abandonment of entire buildings has led to the disorganized and mafia occupation of housing throughout the country and also in Vilafranca.

Facing this new situation, and also due to financial limits (the city budget cannot afford big investments) the search for a more wholesale intervention has become more evident. This is why the city decided for the transfer of the Chemnitz good-practice case, aiming for connecting owners with private investors instead of making the renovation from public budget.

The Good Practice of Chemnitz has important advantages: a public project carried out by a private company, offering a flexible and proactive approach for the revitalisation of the historic housing stock of the city, and over time becoming the central collector and distributer of information on the buildings.

The specific objectives the city would like to achieve with transferring Chemnitz good-practice case are:

• To connect owners with private investors as the city budget cannot afford big investments.
• To connect and coordinate the different stakeholders for the reactivation of the vacant buildings in a right and efficient way.
• Setting up a body/institution to support reactivation of vacant/derelict building/flats.
• Contacting, activating and supporting owners.
• Identifying, contacting and supporting potential buyers and investors
• Connecting & coordinating public & private stakeholders

The challenge is how to achieve this funding without compromising the budget and municipal action, so that the collaboration between the administration (the ‘Housing Agency’, the Urban Planning Office and building Control Department) and the private initiative should be normal practice in a 21st century society.

To approach the problem from this perspective, it became necessary to expand the original social orientation and start looking for private partners with enough technical capacity and sufficient financial solvency. In this sense an agreement has been signed with Habitat3 (housing for social inclusion) foundation and 10 housing units have been recovered so far.

The Habitat3 Foundation is a social rental housing manager whose main objective is to search for and to obtain rental housing at prices below market prices. Habitat3 is a benchmark in Catalonia in the housing sector, being recognized in 2019 with the Gold World Habitat Awards by UN Habitat.

The relation between the City Council and HABITAT3 is a win-win relation: the City council searches the building and the tenants, and once a building has been found, HABITAT3 is contacted for its assessment. Usually HABITAT3 spends around 2 weeks to see the state of the building, the rehabilitation that should be carried out and the investment that would be necessary. Then HABITAT3 decides to invest part of their budget for social housing in Vilafranca. HABITAT3 isn’t paid for this collaboration.

The project helps to mitigate effects of urban processes that are unsustainable. By strengthening the inner city through the concentration and support of developments in the existing central neighbourhoods, the urban structures are valorised. This way, the reuse of historic housing stock helps to save resources instead of promoting suburban sprawl. Dense and mixed-use urban structures reduce distances and encourage alternative means of transport. What is more, the successful outcomes of the project help to preserve the intrinsic qualities of those quarters and help to overcome the negative image of neighbourhoods. The provision with moderately priced and appropriately equipped housing for families, elderly people or marginalised population groups strengthens social coherence and reduces the ground for conflicts of different sorts.

The scope of the project is to activate owners, private and public stakeholders to save, restore and reanimate buildings. It can be described as a networking hub between persons, groups and authorities that have an interest in this goal. Starting and keeping communication going around the objects is the core of the project’s activities.

According to the experiences of Chemnitz, the agency is the only instance that connects the threads from all different sides:

• the relevant departments in the city government (e.g. urban planning, fund management, building control, preservation, finance and tax, public relations),

• the different owner constellations (private owners or ownership groups of different sizes and local/national /international backgrounds, public housing company, unappropriated),

• the potential investors and users (professional real estate developers, grass-roots housing initiatives),

• additional stakeholders in the neighbourhoods and civil society.

It was important to bring relevant stakeholders in the field of housing together through the ULG. Before, the housing commission was responsible for this issue. It consisted only of representatives from each political party. Based on the work of the ULG work has been done to convert the housing commission into a housing council in which not only political parties will participate, but also agents and entities of the housing sector (such as real estate agents or tenant unions).

The Municipal Housing Agency has been relaunched, as a one-stop destination for all issues related to housing with the desire to provide comprehensive services and local housing policies: https://urbanisme.vilafranca.cat/oficina-local-dhabitatge It is located in an office in the city centre and will be the referent point to attend all matters concerning vacant buildings in Vilafranca.

The relaunching of the Municipal Housing Agency allows to improve the capacities

• to identify buildings in need of refurbishment in the future and
• to establish a steady collaboration framework for their refurbishment, beyond the micro work the City Council already does
• to have a unique access point for citizens, where they can meet experts to help them solve their housing problem / find a solution.

After having the database updated, the agency will contact owners proactively and will connect them with investors, explaining the advantages to participate in the public program “From empty buildings to social housing” that deals with the renovation and rehabilitation of vacant housing while reusing them for social purposes. To achieve a better collaboration the town hall has created a round table about housing policies, bringing public and private stakeholders together.

VISION - Through the new housing agency and the grown cooperation among public and private stakeholders through the round table, the outcome will be a decrease the number of empty flats and buildings and there will be new spaces for social purposes like affordable rental flats. Expectations are: increase the number of rental flats in the city center, improve flats and buildings increasing their energy efficiency and reducing the CO2 footprint.

A strong demographic decline and thus numerous vacancies in the old neighbourhoods are typical for former industrial hubs and towns distant from the economic centres in their countries. The lack of communication between the public authorities, often unavailable or unable owners, and the very diverse group of potential investors and users, is a problem that is visible to different extents in almost any city.

The ALT/BAU Transfer Network focused on alternative strategies in central and historic districts of European cities to activate unused and decaying housing stock resulting from demographic, economic and social change. Based on the experiences from Chemnitz’ URBACT Good Practice “Housing Agency for Shrinking Cities” (Agentur StadtWohnen Chemnitz), the network transferred experiences that proved successful to proactively connect administrations, owners, investors and users to initiate sustainable and resource saving development.

Under the leadership of Chemnitz the following partner cities were involved in the ALT/BAU Transfer Network: Riga Latvia, Constanta Romania, Vilafranca del Penedes Spain, Turin Italy, Seraing Belgium, Rybnik Poland.